White Oleander - Janet Fitch [88]
“The La Brea Vortex,” he said.
The phone rang and Ron went through the open French doors to answer it. We saw him lie down on the white quilt, pick at his toenails as he talked. Claire stopped clearing the table, and her face blurred, resolved, blurred. She stood at the picnic table fiddling with the plates, with the scraps and silverware, trying to hear what he was saying.
He hung up and came back to the table. Her shadows swept back by his sun.
“Work?” Claire asked, as if it made no difference.
“Jeffrey wanted to come over and talk about a script. I said no.” He reached out and took her hand. I couldn’t stand to see how she flushed with pleasure.
Now he remembered that I was still there, playing with some saffron rice from the paella on the tabletop, making an orange spiral. “We ’ve got some catching up to do.” He was so smooth. I could imagine him getting some lonely Ouija board reader to confess her conversations with the dead husband on camera, holding her gnarled hand in his smooth one, the smooth gold wedding band, his calm voice saying, “Go on.”
She talked some about what we’d been doing, that she’d signed me up at Fairfax High, that we’d gone to the movies and a jazz concert at the art museum. “Astrid’s quite an artist,” she said. “Show him what you’ve been doing.”
Claire had bought me a set of Pelikan watercolors in a big black case, a book of thick-textured paper. I’d been painting the garden, the droop of the Chinese elm, the poinsettias against the white wall. Spires of delphinium, blush of roses. Copies of the Dürer rabbit. Claire practicing ballet in the living room. Claire with a glass of white wine. Claire, her hair up in a turbaned towel. I didn’t want to show them to Ron. They were too revealing.
“Show him,” Claire said. “They’re beautiful.”
It irked me that she wanted me to show him. I thought they were something between us, from me to her. I didn’t know him. Why did she want me to? Maybe to prove they’d made the right decision in taking me. Maybe to show what a good job she was doing with me.
I went and got the big pad, handed it to Ron, and then went out in the dark garden and kicked the heads off the stray Mexican evening primroses that crept into the lawn. I heard him turning the pages. I couldn’t watch.
“Look at this.” He laughed. “And this. She’s a natural. They’re terrific,” he called out to me in the dark. I kept kicking the heads off the primroses.
“She’s embarrassed,” Claire said. “Don’t be embarrassed, Astrid. You have a gift. How many people can say that?”
The only one I knew was behind bars.
A cricket or night bird was making squeaky sounds like a hamster going around a wheel. On the patio, under the chili lights, Claire described making the paella, as if it were a Keystone comedy, working up an enthusiasm that made my stomach ache. I looked at Ron, in his white shirt washed with a trace of pink-orange from the lights, laughing along with her. His arms crossed behind his head, his pleasant face laughing, his clean foot in its sandal perched on his jean-covered knee. Why don’t you go away, Ron? There were witch doctors waiting to be interviewed, tortilla miracles to be documented. But the sound of her laughter was sticky as sap, the smell of night-blooming jasmine soft as a milk bath.
“Astrid, are you still there?” Claire called out to me, peering into the darkness.
“Just thinking,” I said, pulling a sprig of mint from under the hose bib, crushing it in my hand. Thinking that tonight they would lie together in the pine bed with the rose sheets, and I would be alone again. Women always put men first. That’s how everything got so screwed up.
AFTER MY WEEK alone with Claire, I reluctantly returned to school, to finish out tenth grade at Fairfax High. I was happy enough not to have to go back to Hollywood, where they had seen me eating out of the garbage. This was a whole new start. At Fairfax I was blissfully invisible again. I came home from school each day to